Levy’s latest and very ambitious new book is an inquiry into the fundamental characteristics of political order from two perspectives: philosophical anthropology and the political philosophy of Eric Voegelin. The outcome is a vigorous defense of our institutions and traditions. The anthropological perspective has its roots in Max Scheler’s work in the 1920’s and 1930’s. In Man’s Place in Nature, which came out the year of his death, 1928, Scheler describes a topology of living forms, ascending in complexity, that often seems to echo Aristotle. He asserts that the “limits of psychic life coincide with the boundaries of organic life itself.” Animal life is more differentiated than plant life, and human life is the most differentiated of all. Whereas animal intelligence is exclusively practical, responding in a stable way to his environment, man’s is such that it opens up the world. Scheler attributes this to man being a spiritual being, meaning one who is able to say no to his immediate environment. This accounts for our sometime asceticism and for our capacity for altering the immediate environment.

Obviously such a description of “human nature” would be hotly debated, and even Scheler’s admirers note an unreconciled conflict between a kind of “naturalism” and a kind of idealism. In Levy’s view, it was Nicolai Hartmann who, following Scheler’s lead, put his ontology on a firmer, more systematic footing, which Hartmann would call a “limited ontology,” with no metaphysical speculation on questions of ultimate origins. Starting with Hartmann, Levy asks what is the structure of reality that delimits the space of politics, that space allowing what we may do and what we must do?

He cites Hartmann’s objection that “the activity of man, spiritual life and historical actuality, can by no means be adequately grasped by an understanding of meaning. With this concept we are still in the air, with no firm ground under our feet.” The firm ground that Hartmann means is the four strata of real being, beginning with the inorganic. The claim Hartmann makes, and Levy follows him in, is an intriguing one, that the organic rests or depends upon the inorganic; the conscious and spiritual rest, on the organic, which rests on the inorganic. The upper strata rest on, but are not determined by them. There is a difference in saying that certain conditions are necessary for the forms of cultural life and political order and saying they cause the forms. Levy remarks that “Physical or biological determinism explains, in fact, hardly anything of the known variety of human achievement and nothing of the nature of psychic and cultural experience.”

One of the consequences is a repudiation of the dream of absolute autonomy as the only freedom, relative to its own stratum of being. The world of a (beehive is not a useful paradigm for a human world. But we can learn from the bees. The bees have the instinctual equipment and the inherited biological means of sustenance and defense. We do not, and this bears on “the significance of continuity and tradition in human life. . . . Constancy must be created and incessantly recreated through the formation and maintenance of institutions that effectively limit the range of conceivable options for the individual.” Another consequence, obviously, is a repudiation of the Marxist fantasy of a “post-political” existence. In their own way the bees have already realized it.

While Hartmann’s ontology provides a theory that helps us to grasp the essence of man’s finite freedom, Levy finds there are certain limits to this theory, and to the anthropological perspective. Man feels compelled to search for an order that is attuned to the order inherent in the universe.

It was just such a search for order that Eric Voegelin pursued and the results of this research serve, in Levy’s view, as a creative complement to the Scheler-Hartmann ontology. For Voegelin’s starting point is quite different from the naturalism of Hartmann. He would call into question any theory of the human condition that confines itself to such a naturalism. Any theory would have to account for the persistence of man’s search for the transcendent ground of being and the record of this search as it is reflected in revelations as man reaches out for what is not itself in his attempt at self-interpretation. This interpretation expresses itself not just in myths, but in its institutions.

The thrust of Levy’s inquiry emphasizes the constant features of the human condition. The space of politics is not a boundless vacuum where any kind of imaginary project can take place precisely because of these constant features and the persistent contours of the environment. Such an idea of politics flies in the face of revolutionary ideologies that are not interested in conserving either nature or human nature, but only its transmutation. Modern technology has greatly enhanced the illusion that anything is possible, and that the only reason any scheme is not effected is a failure of politics. Guided by that superstition, if something is not to modern man’s liking, someone must be to blame. The state thus becomes merely part of the “machinery of desire” and man remains vulnerable to the temptations of revolutionary ideologies that reduce the mysteries of existence to economic solutions. It is much like promising and delivering a TV for every room in the commune, but the only story or picture to watch is one of a room with a TV in a commune.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the Devil says, “just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.” Likewise we can take our institutions, which provide us with guidance, and our technology, which helps us to maintain ourselves, and twist them to Utopian schemes and ideologies, and on the way we are housed in the gulag of means.

Mills_Review

[Political Order: Philosophical Anthropology, Modernity, and the Challenge of Ideology, by David J. Levy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press) $22.50]